Legible Displacement: Temporary Protected Status and the Production of Legal Vulnerability, 1990-2025

• In Event: Beyond Asylum and Resettlement: Diverse Modes of Refugee Migration

Abstract

Public discourse around immigration in the United States imagines a binary of migrant and non-migrant, where one is either in legitimate status, or lacking status entirely. Yet legal status is best conceptualized as a spectrum of vulnerability, where different pathways lead to differing rights, social membership, and belonging. The mechanisms of refugee resettlement and asylum provide legal protection for a minuscule fraction of the world's displaced migrants, and in recent months, the Trump administration has functionally paused asylum processing and continued to gut refugee resettlement. In this context, where durable forms of protection are increasingly scarce, how are alternative mechanisms of legal integration produced and administered? Who is determined worthy of them, and why? This paper uses the case of temporary protected status (TPS) to chart the production and administration of a key liminal pathway in U.S. humanitarian immigration law. Drawing from 60+ semi-structured interviews with civil society advocates and bureaucratic & political state actors, archival and contemporary records, and ethnographic observations across advocacy meetings and events, I trace how contradictory interpretations of "temporary" are deployed strategically by actors, shaping the granting of TPS designations and subsequent processes of claims-making for the expansion of rights for TPS holders. I chart three distinct interpretations that have shaped the production and administration of TPS: temporariness as a political compromise, temporariness as a tool for projects of documentation, and temporariness as a tool facilitating de-documentation — the stripping of protections previously provided on a group basis. Throughout these interpretations, temporality is contested at multiple levels of TPS advocacy and policymaking, ranging from the granting of country-designations to claims for pathways to permanent residency by advocates. Rather than viewing legal categories as static, or distinctions between "voluntary" and "forced" migrants as self-evident, I focus on the work of advocates and state actors to examine the processes of negotiation and contestation that shape their production and allocation over time. Building on scholars who urge for the interrogation of legal categories in immigration law rather than their naturalization, this paper further demonstrates that legal categories are political tools that can be deployed to justify worthiness or perpetuate exclusion.

Author

• Neha Lund, Brown University